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swype (Photo credit: hahatango)

Last night Nuance released Swype on Google Play, marking the swishy keyboard app's debut on the store after being primarily embedded into smartphones or available through the Android marketplace. It also represented a broader goal of Nuance as a speech recognition company: creating personal dictionaries that better understand what we say and type to a machine, be it a smartphone, car or laptop.

Swype, which Nuance bought in 2011 for $102.5 million, works by looping your finger around a touch-screen keyboard and connecting the letters to form words. The newest version of the keyboard, released last night for 99 cents, also predicts words by learning what a user types over time.

There's a lot of competition on this front from keyboard app SwiftKey, which learns what its users type to better predict text. SwiftKey's vanilla-label technology has been embedded into BlackBerry's Z10 phone and the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S4, and a few months ago, SwiftKey cheekily released an updated version of its Android app called Flow, which aped Swype's non-tap interface.

Now Swype is moving further onto SwiftKey's predictive turf, and claiming to do a better job. "We've made some really important strides in a way they haven't," said Nuance vice president Aaron Sheedy, who was formerly chief operating officer of Swype.

Sheedy said Swype bested SwiftKey in predicting the words to long statements typed frequently into emails and texts -- specifically up to eight words. More than simply predicting that "coffee" might come after "cup of…," for instance, it forecasts that "station" will follow, "I will see you at the train…"

It's unclear how that differentiates from SwiftKey's own prediction engine; a SwiftKey spokesperson did not wish to comment. The ultimate challenge is for an algorithm to identify context and intent - an endgame that may still be some ways away.

One advantage for Swype is the backing of Nuance, a $7 billion company whose voice-recognition technology is already everywhere: from 's iPhone assistant Siri to infotainment systems on Ford cars to Samsung's Smart TV's and Galaxy phones. It competes directly with Now, whose voice recognition system is designed to replicate the brain's neural networks.

Sheedy said the release of Swype represented the beginning of Nuance's goal to "follow you around," underlining a future where we talk to our cars, TVs, phones and laptops. Swype is thus a vehicle for building a "personalized language model" for each human being it interacts with.

Of the 65,000 words in the English dictionary, most English-speakers will only use 5-6,000, Sheedy said. Yet even these are constantly in flux, with words like "yollo" and "lulz" trending in and out of our vernacular. Language gets decided further by geography (Australians saying "brekkie" instead of "breakfast") and demographic. As Nuance develops the natural language algorithms that help it detect speech, it is working towards personal language models too, tailored to what individuals themselves tend to say.

"It starts with Swype," Sheedy said, though he went on talk more vaguely about how Nuance intended to become a more direct communication conduit between people and machines. Considering it is already in iPhones and Galaxy phones, and also competes with Google Now, might it piggyback an OEM, embedding itself more deeply in an operating system?

"We're working with lots of different folks," is all that Sheedy would say.

One route might be to partner with chip maker , who is working on a peer-to-peer app development framework called AllJoyn. Engineers on the project are working on protocols that let devices talk to one another in the same way they might harness the standards for WiFi or Bluetooth.

Nuance equally might just push out a standalone product to challenge Google Now and Siri. Last January it announced project Wintermute, a personal assistant mobile app that worked across any mobile platform and, crucially, maintained profiles of individual users in the cloud. Wintermute has not been released to the public yet, but you can read more about it here.